AvAngel.com Censorship Lifted

After a bit of a battle between Information Services at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and I, resulting in the semipermanent blocking of the Unversity’s right to see www.penbryn-hall.co.uk, and the temporary blocking of AvAngel.com (Woohoo! I’m officially censored by the University), access to the site from the University’s network is now re-opened. Thanks to everybody who gave me the support I needed to go and tell them where to shove it…

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #50:

Sit up ’til 5:00am coding for a project that doesn’t have to be in until a week on Friday. On the up side, discover the root cause of the bug that was holding back the progress of the Group Project, and, by redeveloping some source code, cut down estimated production time by two days. Get lots of praise for this. Be happy.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #49:

Tear apart a pile of stolen computer keyboards to make a cool name plaque for your door, with real pressable buttons for each letter of your name, and not-pressable ones that say Enter, and Compose Character, and Do, and Lock, and, my favourite of all, stolen from an old dumb terminal, Rub Out. Also Blu Tack on some old network cards and a circuitbord. My room here is really starting to become a home…

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #47:

Steal some old VT-320 keyboards from the skip outside the Llandinam Extension and smash them up to make a cool nameplate for your door out of the keys. It reads:
[D][A][N][I][E][L], then lower, [Enter], and then by the lock, [Lock]. Not bad, I thought.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #41:

Discover a major security flaw in the university network, that provides any user with half a brain, a computer in their room, some practice, and a lot of patience, the means to get the password of anybody else on your local workgroup, leaving them exposed to malicious attacks, e-mail theft, use of their print quota, and all kinds of other problems. It’s such a serious problem that I’m not going to go into further detail here, in case this e-mail gets into the hands of somebody on the network. Later, discover that this loophole has already been discovered and is abused by at least one third year student. I’ve arranged for John (who aided me in discovering the problem) and I to meet with network services management to inform them of the problem – simply because we feel threatened by it

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #36:

(1) Recieve an e-mail from your Personal Tutor, asking to see you in his office in ten minutes. He knows I check my e-mail 1440 times a day, but dragging me to this level of nerdity is ridiculous…
(2) …make it to his office, cross campus, within eight minutes of him sending the e-mail… Okay – so I *live* in my anorak. I don’t care. =o( I’m going to go and sit in the corner and sulk now.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #35:

Raid a skip outside the computer labs, filled to the brim with semi-defunct equipment. Steal several cables, some dumb-terminal keyboards, and a PSU (which was funtional, but later caught fire). Spend much of the remainder of the afternoon taking broken monitors from it and throwing them from great distances into the skip again, just ’cause you want to see if you can make them implode and blow a hole in the side of the skip. Fail. Spend much of the evening trying to get an old 8086 your flatmate pulled from it to work. Succeed… to a degree… it just doesn’t *do* much!

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #21:

Desperatley try to find a reason not to get a ‘professional’ domain name (e.g. www.avapoet.com), and fail. Panic, and write to your current service provider, asking questions which you’re sure they’ll answer unfavourabley, to save yourself from the urge to get your dream vanity domain. Fail, when they prove to be nothing but useful. Look for justification elsewhere. What do you lot think

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #16:

Realise that you’ve got over 970 songs on MP3 format, taking up over 3.25GB of hard drive space. Decide that you need to find a new (cheap) hard drive on which to store them all. Mention this in the “Cool Things” e-mail in case anybody has any suggestions as to where you can get one from.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

My GeekCode

This page was posted to one of my first websites, on 25 March 1998 (as well as appearing in my email/usenet signatures etc.). It was republished here on 22 March 2021.


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